The Last 50 Ft

Autolane

The Last 50 Feet where the physical world catches up to the hype. We cover what actually happens when autonomous vehicles, robots, and AI-powered logistics hit the pavement — at grocery stores, retail properties, QSR drive-throughs, and the last hundred feet of every delivery. No lab demos. The infrastructure, the deals, the operators making it real. Brought to you by Autolane — the platform coordinating autonomous vehicles and robotics on private property, one zone at a time.

  1. Jul 30

    Ep #17 | Angell Tsang, Co-Founder of Tso Chinese: Customers Over Clicks, Eliminating Spreadsheets, and Going Live After Skepticism

    Angell Tsang is the Co-Founder and Chief AI Officer of Tso Chinese Takeout and Delivery, Autolane's first autonomous delivery partner in Austin. He is also the reason this episode has an unusual number of accidental puns. Angell did not start in restaurants. He started in software QA, ran engineering teams across startups, and in 2016 was eating dinner at his friend Min's restaurant when Min said he had a dumb idea. That idea became Tso Chinese, a delivery first Chinese food brand built from scratch in a converted pizza restaurant in Austin's Cherrywood neighborhood. No sit down dining. Just code they wrote themselves, a scratch kitchen, and a very bright wrapped delivery car that people still remember today. Ten years later Tso has five locations across Austin, investors including the former co-CEO of Whole Foods, the former CEO of Wendy's, and the founder of Bonobos, and a partnership with Autolane that Angell never saw coming. He walked past Autolane's Tesla at ShopTalk in March. He thought autonomous delivery was five years away. He moved on. Then Cam followed up. Then a Slack channel happened. Then they went live and the rest is history. This episode covers how Tso built their own restaurant operating system because Shopify does not ship Chinese food on demand. Why W2 drivers never stole their food but 1099 contractors have a statistic that is higher than zero percent. Why the Tesla will never eat your pot stickers...yet? What happens to Chinese American cuisine when the 65 plus generation of mom and pop owners retires over the next decade. And why Angell's entire philosophy as Chief AI Officer comes down to three words: customers over clicks. Oh and he named all his AI agents with Tso puns. TSophie. TSora. TSolomon. 🏁 goautolane.com | tsochinese.com

    Ep #17 | Angell Tsang, Co-Founder of Tso Chinese: Customers Over Clicks, Eliminating Spreadsheets, and Going Live After Skepticism

  2. Jul 23

    Ep #16 | Michelle Kwok, Partner at Draper VC: Bag of Organs, Kazoo Guitar Duets, and Why She Bet on Autolane When Nobody Else Got It

    Fair warning. This one goes places. Michelle Kwok is a partner at Draper VC and one of Autolane's earliest investors. She led the pre-seed round when most VCs could not even fathom what Ben was building. Her portfolio includes artificial womb technology, limb regeneration using bioelectric signals, scarless skin healing, and a company they affectionately call bag of organs at the office. She is also funding the infrastructure for the internet in space. Just in case anyone needed that. She is also the very first female guest on The Last 50 Ft. Producer Kyle led the conversation alongside Ben for this one and the energy was immediately different. Michelle plays piano, violin, guitar, and drums by ear. And the kazoo simultaneously with guitar. She can learn any pop song in five minutes flat without sheet music. Her favorite movie is Meet the Robinsons. Her favorite ice cream flavor is vanilla. Ben and Kyle had thoughts on this. The conversation covers how Michelle knew Autolane was onto something when other VCs could not even understand the premise. What it is like being a woman in VC and how those rooms are slowly changing. Then Ben goes on one of his most expansive philosophical runs yet about what a 90 percent reduction in delivery cost means for libraries, food banks, farms, meals on wheels, and basically the entire structure of how human beings access goods and services. Oh and an ice cream delivery showed up mid-recording. Completely unplanned. Absolutely perfect timing. Although the flavor was vanilla - this episode was anything but. 🏁 goautolane.com | draper.vc

    Ep #16 | Michelle Kwok, Partner at Draper VC: Bag of Organs, Kazoo Guitar Duets, and Why She Bet on Autolane When Nobody Else Got It

  3. Jul 16

    Ep #15 | Producer Kyle Takes the Mic: The Tso Launch Breakdown, the Georgia Food Tampering Bill, and Why Women Are Autonomous Delivery's Earliest Adopters

    Cam is on a ferry somewhere in the San Juan Islands celebrating his anniversary. So this week it is just Ben and Producer Kyle, and it might be the most honest episode yet. Kyle steps out from behind the scenes for the first time to co-host with Ben, and the conversation goes places the pod has never gone before. Ben walks through exactly how the Tso Chinese Takeout & Delivery autonomous delivery launch works end to end. A customer orders on the Tso Chinese website. The order flows into Nash. Autolane bids as a delivery provider. If they win, the customer gets a text: reply Y for autonomous, reply N for a regular human delivery. If they say yes, the Tesla drives itself to their address, the customer gets a tracking link, walks out to the curb, presses open trunk, grabs their order, and the car drives away. Nobody touches your food. No interaction and no special app downloaded. Then Ben shares an insight from the first week of live operations that neither of them expected. The same reason women loved Waymo from day one is showing up in autonomous delivery. And it has nothing to do with cost savings or no-tip delivery or any of the reasons the industry talks about. It is safety. Not road safety. Safety from the driver. Kyle talks about traveling alone at 27, getting off planes in cities she did not know, and always hoping the person in the Uber was safe. She talks about being home alone now as a mom and not loving when an unmarked vehicle pulls into her driveway at night with a stranger inside. Ben calls it the most important emerging insight from the first week of live operations. They also get into the Georgia Senate bill about delivery driver food tampering, why DoorDash and Uber can never legally solve this problem because their drivers are 1099 contractors and not W2 employees, and why that structural gap is exactly what Autolane is built to fill. Oh and Ben promises to have Claude count how many times he said so/Tso in this episode. The results are not being shared. 🏁 goautolane.com | tsochinese.com

    Ep #15 | Producer Kyle Takes the Mic: The Tso Launch Breakdown, the Georgia Food Tampering Bill, and Why Women Are Autonomous Delivery's Earliest Adopters

  4. Jul 9

    Ep #14.5 | Shane Feldberg, Founder of Feld Ventures: First Check Into Autolane, the Shirky Principle, and Why Whoever Passes Is an Idiot

    Shane Feldberg was the very first person to ask for allocation in Autolane. Shane runs Feld Ventures, a fund he built over six years from a network he developed at ClearBank, a fintech company that built the 20-minute term sheet using machine learning before machine learning was cool. They took it to a $2.5 billion valuation. Shane then left to back the founders he met along the way. Fifty plus portfolio companies. Eight figures deployed and climbing toward nine. He believes startups are the way out. Not just for returns, for cancer, for diabetes, but for every problem humanity has not solved yet. He thinks one way to unlock the compute needed to get there is solar-powered data centers in space. He's not joking. On this episode Ben, Cam and Shane get into why contrarian thinking is the only way to be good at early stage investing. Why Autolane could be Shane's best investment despite having some of the top 30 companies in the world in his portfolio. The Shirky Principle and why institutions will always try to preserve the problems they were designed to solve. Why personal injury lawyers lobbying against autonomous vehicles might be one of the most genuinely evil things happening in America right now. And why 40,000 people dying in cars every year while the technology to prevent it exists is something that keeps everyone of them up at night. Ben and Cam also report back from Austin where they took 10 unsupervised Tesla Robotaxi rides in Model Ys identical to Autolane's fleet. Ben's verdict: the technology is absolutely here. It is just a matter of when Tesla decides to push it to consumer cars. Oh and Shane is Canadian. He says PROcess and the very Canadian way of sorry. He was given allocation anyway. 🏁 goautolane.com | feldventures.com

    Ep #14.5 | Shane Feldberg, Founder of Feld Ventures: First Check Into Autolane, the Shirky Principle, and Why Whoever Passes Is an Idiot

  5. Jul 9

    Ep #14 | Ming Maa, Co-Founder and CEO of Moove AV: The Man Who Scaled Grab to 500 Cities Says the Car Is Only 30% of the AV Cost

    Ming Maa started his career at Goldman Sachs. Then he went to SoftBank where he sat alongside Masa Son and ran every major ride share investment globally before the Vision Fund even existed. Then he became President of Grab and scaled it across eight countries and more than 500 cities before taking it public. Then he decided investing was not enough. He wanted to build. Ming is now Co-Founder and CEO of Moove AV, the world's largest dedicated infrastructure provider for autonomous vehicles. Moove operates the entire Waymo fleet in Phoenix and Miami with zero Waymo employees on the ground. London is next. They handle everything from 40-megawatt charging infrastructure across multiple sites to managing haboobs, the massive rolling dust storms that engulf Phoenix and require a full fleet recall in minutes. And Ming drops the number that reframes the entire autonomous vehicle investment thesis: the car itself is only 30 to 40 percent of the total cost of commercializing autonomous vehicles. The other 60 to 70 percent is fleet operations. Charging. Cleaning. Maintenance. Infrastructure. People. The moat in autonomy is not the vehicle. It is everything that happens after it rolls out of the factory. Ming also identifies the two things every city needs to unlock before AVs can truly scale. One of them is curbside infrastructure. The other is PUDO zone coordination at airports, malls, and stadiums. Which is exactly what Autolane builds. Ben announces on the pod that three of Phoenix's largest shopping centers are coming onto the Autolane platform next week. The first city where Moove AV and Autolane will converge. And Austin direct delivery went live this week. 🏁 goautolane.com | moove.io

  6. Jul 2

    Ep #13 | Alex Roy, Host of Autonocast: Autolane Is Built to Win, the 1946 Elevator Strike, and Austin Goes Live

    Alex Roy has been covering autonomous vehicles longer than almost anyone. Ten years hosting the Autonocast, widely regarded as the top podcast in autonomy. Former Director of Special Operations at Argo AI, where he spent years putting autonomous vehicles on the streets of Miami and meeting with everyone from local elected officials to VIP riders. He is on his fifth Tesla. He ran the cannonball record on 100% FSD earlier this year. And he is an official Autolane advisor. He also thinks Autolane is a great candidate to scale or for acquisition. His words. Ben, Cam and Alex get into the AV 1.0 to 2.0 transition and why neural networks changed everything. The political orphan problem of autonomy and why neither the left nor the right has fully embraced it despite the technology being demonstrably safer than human drivers. And the most compelling job displacement analogy we have heard on this podcast: the New York City elevator operator strike of 1946, which brought the city's economy to a standstill, forced every building to upgrade to automated elevators, and resulted in the total number of people employed by the elevator industry growing tenfold over the next 25 years. Ben also makes two announcements on the pod. Austin direct delivery launches next week. And Autolane is coming to Scottsdale Fashion Square and the Phoenix market. Alex's prediction on when private Tesla owners get unsupervised FSD: 24 months, pre-selected by Tesla Insurance based on your driving risk profile. If you are David Moss or Alex Roy, you are not getting it first. And he closes with a 1970 film recommendation that he says Elon Musk has clearly seen and everyone in AI and autonomy should watch immediately. 🏁 goautolane.com | autonocast.com

  7. Jun 25

    Ep #12 | Harry Campbell, Host of the Driverless Digest: The Rideshare Guy Got in a Waymo and Everything Changed

    Harry Campbell has spent over a decade as the most trusted voice for Uber and Lyft drivers. He built The Rideshare Guy into a media brand reaching millions of drivers every month. He published a book. He launched courses, a podcast, a YouTube channel, and a live show. He has interviewed Uber's CEO. He knows the gig economy better than almost anyone alive. Then he got into a Waymo in Los Angeles. His reaction: dude, this is awesome. That single ride sparked the Driverless Digest, a weekly newsletter covering the intersection of autonomy and rideshare. It sparked Curbivore, his annual conference in LA on the future of mobility. And it sparked the Urban Autonomy Summit, a quarterly pop-up event bringing together AV industry leaders in cities across the country. Autolane will be joining Harry in Austin on October 14th. Harry joins Ben and Cam for one of the most honest conversations on the pod yet. What do ride share drivers actually think about autonomous vehicles? The data might surprise you. In AV cities, human driver earnings have declined by only 3 to 5%. That is less than the impact of high gas prices. But the fear is real. They also get into Ben's UberEats and FSD experiment, why using Tesla FSD as a rideshare driver might actually be the best strategy in the industry right now, and the awkward gray area when a passenger realizes the driver is not really driving. And then there is the number that reframes everything. Waymo is doing 500,000 rides per week globally. New York City alone does 700,000 Uber and Lyft trips every single day. The transition is real. It is just earlier than the headlines suggest. 🏁 goautolane.com | thedriverlessdigest.com

  8. Jun 18

    Ep #11 | Jonas Lamis, Founder of Remount: Tesla Is Producing 50 Cybercabs a Day, Regular People Can Now Own a Fleet, and a Salt Lamp Is on the Line

    Jonas Lamis has spent 20 years building on the frontier. First in AI data analysis. Then in web3. Now he is six weeks into Remount, a platform designed to let regular people own, operate, and profit from the coming wave of autonomous vehicles. Think of it as a REIT for robot fleets. Jonas joins Ben and Cam from his home in suburban Palo Alto, literally one mile from Google's X Labs in one direction and Tesla's design center in the other. He has been watching autonomous vehicles circle his neighborhood for a decade. He finally decided to do something about it. Ben makes the case for why a company like Remount may be the most important piece of infrastructure nobody is talking about yet. The autonomous commerce demand is coming. The Autolane platform is ready. But if the vehicle supply cannot scale fast enough to meet that demand the whole industry stalls. Jonas is building the capital layer that could prevent that. They also get into the numbers. Tesla is now producing as many as 50 Cybercabs per day at Giga Texas. 150 were spotted in the outbound lot in a single photo posted this week. Cybercabs have been seen in 23 cities across the country. Jonas thinks reservations open in late Q3. Then comes the bet. Ben, Cam, and Jonas each pick the week they think a Cybercab completes its first unsupervised commercial ride. The wager is a salt lamp and a 3D sculpture Jonas refuses to part with. Cam picks his own birthday. Ben takes second week of July. Jonas goes late August. Only one of them can be right. 🏁 goautolane.com | remount.co

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About

The Last 50 Feet where the physical world catches up to the hype. We cover what actually happens when autonomous vehicles, robots, and AI-powered logistics hit the pavement — at grocery stores, retail properties, QSR drive-throughs, and the last hundred feet of every delivery. No lab demos. The infrastructure, the deals, the operators making it real. Brought to you by Autolane — the platform coordinating autonomous vehicles and robotics on private property, one zone at a time.

Information

  • Creator
    Autolane
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    18
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Autolane
  • Show Website
    The Last 50 Ft